RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach of laying-out and coding a website such that the website provides an optimal viewing experience. Such as ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

The designer creating a Responsive Design should ensure that the website’s navigation elements, screen-layouts, text, images, audio/video players and other UI elements re-adjust themselves on a variety of devices. No one don’t need to spend extra time and money in creating and maintaining one “mobile-site version” and another “desktop-site version” of their website.

Now, having understood what is Responsive Web Design, let us understand why Responsive Design is important while creating websites.

6 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER HAVING RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

1. Why Is Responsive Web Design Important For Your Website?

Smartphones and tablets have changed the approach toward design and user experience. Before the proliferation of mobile devices with advanced web-browsing capability , web designers had only one primary challenge to deal with. Like keeping the same look and feel of their websites in various desktop computer browsers.

However, interacting with websites on smartphones and tablets is not the same as doing that on a desktop computer monitors. Factors such as Click versus Touch, Screen-size, Pixel-resolution, support for Adobe’s Flash technology, optimized markup and many more have become crucial while creating websites with Responsive Design.

2. Time & Money

The notion that making a responsive website is expensive is just that, a notion. The fact is, the cost to make a responsive website is somewhat more than making a conventional website. But the expenses to duplicate a website for mobile and other devices gets completely eliminated. As a result that cuts total development costs significantly. In addition to that, a responsive design cuts the total ownership cost by taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website i.e. a “desktop-version”, a “mobile-version”. Thus, in the long term, investing in responsive website design is the smartest decision.

3. Pervasion of the mobile devices

Internet traffic originating from mobile devices is rising exponentially each day. More and more people get used to browsing the web through their smartphones and tablets. Therefore it is foolhardy for any website publisher to ignore responsive web design. The “One Site Fits All Devices” approach soon will be the norm.

4. User experience

While, content is king and discoverability of content are foremost success metrics, it is the user experience that enables visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice and preference, anytime. Thus, responsive web design is about providing the optimal user experience irrespective of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV.

5. Device Agnostic

Responsive Websites are agnostic to devices and their operating systems. Responsive web design ensures that users get the best experience of a website on any device. No matter is it iPhone, the iPad, the smartphones running the Android OS, Windows OS or any other. As a result website owners and content publishers don’t need to think about an option to build versions of their website for every popular device platform which they expect their audience might be using.

6. The way ahead

Rather than compartmentalizing website content into disparate, device-specific experiences, it is smarter to adopt the responsive web design approach. That’s not to say there isn’t a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices. For example, if the user-goals for your mobile content-offering are limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach.

But that kind of design-thinking does not have to be our default. Now more than ever, digital content is meant to be viewed on a spectrum of different experiences. Responsive web design offers the way forward.